Afterglow in the Desert
The Art of Fernand Lungren

The following essay is from the Catalog to the Lungren Exhibit Afterglow in the Desert: The Art of Fernand Lungren

Fernand Lungren’s bequest to the city and people of Santa Barbara consists of approximately 320 paintings and drawings representing most of the phases of his artistic career. The Santa Barbara State Teacher’s College (as it was then called)¹ was charged with preserving all the pictures then in his "studio and art gallery" as a permanent exhibition "to be open to the public under such proper restrictions and at such suitable times as are customarily provided for such exhibitions." The artist explained his intentions with characteristic modesty:

As my artistic efforts seem to have given a large number of people considerable interest and pleasure, the expression of which by them has been a great source of happiness to me, it has seemed well…to preserve in one group those pictures remaining in my studio and gallery to be held permanently for the use of the people of the City of Santa Barbara and its vicinity, in memory of my wife and myself, in appreciation of the happiness we found in this community, and with the hope that this provision will result in as much pleasure to the community as I have in making it.²

Three general points are of note with regard to the bequest. First, Lungren shaped this group of paintings and drawings to provide the basis for a museum. Second, he saw his art as inspiration for the growth of a community of artists in Santa Barbara. Finally, he directed the legacy to the largest humanities institution of the time in Santa Barbara, the local college, which ultimately became the University of California at Santa Barbara.³

Lungren’s bequest became one of the first collections to be processed upon the founding of the University Art Galleries at UCSB (later to be named the University Art Museum). An impetus for forming a collection came from the Francis Minturn Sedgwick gift of 1960, 20 Old Master paintings including important works by Gerard David, Juan de Flandes, and Jacob van Ruisdael, donated with the explicit goal of prompting the formation of a university museum "comparable to the FitzWilliam Museum at Cambridge and the Fogg Museum at Harvard."⁴ In 1964, University officials and community supporters worked together to acquire the Sigmund Morgenroth collection of 436 Renaissance medals and plaquettes. This important acquisition together with the Lungren bequest and other major gifts helped establish the Museum as a collecting institution.

My first exposure to Lungren came with the collection inventory of 1993. On that occasion all of the paintings were removed from the vault and I had the opportunity to view a surprising number of similar desert scenes and other landscapes. I saw numerous accomplished canvases done both early and late in the artist’s career. At the same time, many of the 188 paintings were unfinished: some were nearly resolved except for one or two areas, others had been abandoned midstream. There were nearly 50 oil sketches, studies painted on site, of cactus (cat. no. 49), snow flurries (cat. nos. 46–47), rolling clouds (cat. no. 42), and other visual phenomena. Numerous objects were damaged. Tears and losses disfigured some of the most beautiful scenes. In some cases large areas of paint had lifted off the canvas and were in imminent danger. All of the paintings needed cleaning; many had the characteristic brownish yellow surface that reflects decades of smoke-filled rooms. But they were compelling nonetheless, from the attractive and well-observed views of the high Sierra to the occasional seascape.

What I found most impressive were some of the desert landscapes. Many of them seemed highly consistent in composition—a low-slung horizon, minimal details of sage brush, creosote, or other desert shrubs in the foreground, and perhaps a crenellated mesa in the distance. They also exhibited a remarkable palette. In contrast to the realism of Lungren’s mountain lake pictures, for example, or the cityscapes (which turned out to be "early work"), these desert paintings abandoned local color, i.e., the hues we know to be present. Many were painted in variations of cerulean, ultramarine, and other blues, others pictured the sky as pale yellow and the ground in tones of violet. The most striking to me was and remains Sands of Silence (cat. no. 45), a mauve monochrome with virtually no "incident": just gradual horizontal bands of shifting tones, suggesting the patterning of light and shadow in variations of pinks and purples. Here was an artist who occasionally approached abstraction. He also came very close to working in series, where several paintings use the same composition and vary only by a controlled factor, such as the coloristic effects of a specific time of day or meteorological event. Series and monochromes were two of the formal categories signifying the avant-garde in other areas of the world during the first three decades of the 20th century, the period when Lungren produced these undated canvases. Yet there is no evidence in the meager surviving documentation that Lungren had any consciousness of art being shown in New York or Paris in the early years of the 20th century.

Nearly all of the written information available on Lungren derives from a biography by John A. Berger, published in 1936. The Foreword was by Stewart Edward White, a prolific writer on Western themes and Lungren’s first friend in Santa Barbara. About Berger little is known: he turns up elsewhere as "Registrar of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts," a community organization that Lungren had helped to found in his efforts to strengthen the cultural community in Santa Barbara. Berger’s enthusiastic chronicle of the artist’s life at times verges on hagiography, but if we discount the stylistic flourishes of biography at the time, he provides considerable information evidently gleaned from Lungren himself as well as his circle. Berger seems also to have had notebooks and other documents at his disposal that are now lost.⁵

Lungren’s path is an interesting one, following patterns characteristic of American art at the turn of the last century. The first was the burning desire to become an artist, and his difficulty in finding a way to do so. Dropping out of the mining engineering program at the University of Michigan at the age of 20, he traced a path from Toledo, where his family lived, to Cincinnati, where he encountered the young artist Robert Blum, then followed Blum to Philadelphia, in search of a community he could join. Jane Dini’s essay in this catalogue ably chronicles the young artist’s development, his formation of a circle of associates, and his relationship to the broader developments in American art between 1880 and 1900. Of particular interest are the myriad artists he knew and the numerous contexts in which he was active. He worked alongside an eclectic but star-studded list of the artists of the period, including Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, and James A. McNeill Whistler. Working for Scribner’s Monthly, Century Magazine, and other periodicals, he became a significant figure in the Golden Age of illustration, the period when artistic activity found a new mass audience in America. He visited Paris in 1882–1884 as a fledgling artist. He spent three years in London in 1899–1901 as an accomplished artist, and was welcomed into the circle around Whistler. Striking opportunities offered him new vistas. As one of the first group of artists sent along the routes of the Santa Fe Railroad, beginning in 1892 and continuing through 1897, he was exposed to the dramatic landscapes of the Southwest, and found an immediate audience for this subject. In London in 1900 Henry Wellcome invited Lungren and his wife, Henrietta, to join his expedition to Egypt. Finally, moving to the West Coast at the beginning of the 20th century, he focused on a unique goal of depicting the mysteries of the Southwest desert.⁶

In 1876 Lungren enrolled briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he would have been exposed to the aesthetic and pedagogical techniques of Thomas Eakins. This was one of two very truncated experiences with arts education; Lungren also studied very briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris, leaving because he had no interest in drawing from plaster casts. Instead the artist was largely self-taught, which led both to shortcomings—such as his difficulty with drawing people and animals—and advantageous freedom from "academic" standards and cliches. From the early 1880s through the turn of the century, Lungren experimented somewhat briskly with a range of subjects and styles: American Impressionism · la Childe Hassam; realist cityscapes of New York, much of them redolent of his magazine illustrations; and Western scenes—both landscapes and genre images of Southwest Indian life—comparable to his contemporary Frederick Remington, who like Lungren was supporting his painting with magazine illustrations. Whereas Remington focused on the figures of men and horses, using his Yale training in anatomy to construct highly dramatic narratives, Lungren’s interest always centered on the landscape.

Magazine illustration work had a major effect on Lungren’s development. The first publication he illustrated was "Fortunes and Misfortunes of Company ‘C’," in the February 1879 Scribner’s Monthly. Later that year he contributed images to another article in Scribner’s as well as two for St. Nicholas, a children’s periodical published by the same company, and continued to work steadily for those two journals for the next of couple years. After his first trip to Europe, he resumed working for St. Nicholas, where he was represented nearly every year between 1886 and 1904, as well as Century Magazine, appearing in 14 or more issues between 1884 and 1903. Alexander W. Drake, considered a prime mover in the growth of magazines in the last quarter of the 19th century, was art editor of Century, Scribner’s, and St. Nicholas. Under his direction Lungren produced a bewildering array of subjects, from soldiers to fairy-tale royal courts, from fanciful histories of Handel, Lafayette, and Peter the Great, to investigative observations of an old Virginia town and New York City slums. This experience taught him how to take on nearly any subject. In contrast, it is not clear how long Lungren studied at the Pennsylvania Academy or how close his association was with Eakins. Perhaps Lungren’s deployment of gritty details as in "Shantytown," published in the October 1880 Scribner’s, reflects his Pennsylvania Academy experience.

Lungren’s illustrations for periodicals where Drake did not work have more consistency in style and focus. When he began to contribute to Harper’s Magazine, and later McClure’s Magazine and The Outlook, he was an established artist with a specialization in the American West. Unlike the eclectic themes of his work for Scribner’s, St. Nicholas, and Century, these later illustrations draw on Lungren’s specific expertise in the geology and cultures of the West. Moreover, the commissions might have resulted from his close associations with the authors of the articles, including Charles F. Lummis, Stewart Edward White, and William Allen White.

Another decisive experience was his (probably marginal) association with the Tile Club, a playful and obstreperous group of vanguard artists including Chase, J. Alden Weir, and Elihu Vedder. Judging from the numerous plates in A Book of the Tile Club, there is no indication that even his friend Blum was a true member of the Club, which "restricted their roll-call to a specified and very small number."⁷ However, Lungren and Blum were included in a Tile Club expedition to Europe in 1882 and shared a cabin. The trip itself is amusingly recounted in "Log of an Ocean Studio," written by Clarence Clough Buel for Century Magazine, January 1884.⁸ The stated goal was to go and hate the Paris Salon. Lungren is referred to as the "nightmare painter, for his gloomy rain scenes." His insistence on painting the hellish vision of men stoking the ship’s furnaces contrasts dramatically with the bourgeois subjects he painted in Paris and the politically neutral work he sought later in his life.

Despite the commitment of the jolly travelers to revile the new art in Paris, Impressionism seems to have penetrated Lungren’s skin. During this two-year sojourn he produced several works that deserve to be called American Impressionism. Only one, The Gardens of Luxembourg (cat. no. 2), is included in the present exhibition.⁹ No reflection of this body of work exists in the Lungren bequest, perhaps the only major development of Lungren’s career so excluded. One reason might be that these works sold easily. The small number of recorded activities during and after this trip suggests that Lungren might have been selling enough works to support himself. By the mid-1880s there was a strong market for such images of glamorous, lyrical Parisian life as Woman in a Cafe (see Dini, pp. 30–31), a painting listed as belonging to Childe Hassam and now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Lady Reclining on a Sofa, which Dini analyzes in relation to Whistler and which also speaks of a debt to Tissot. Paris Street Scene (Terra Foundation for the Arts) attests to the influence of Gustave Caillebotte, whose realist paintings were perhaps more accessible than work of Monet or other artists Lungren encountered in Paris in the early 1880s.

There is no record of how many "Impressionist" paintings Lungren produced, of their critical reception, or how they were sold. The question of how this experience influenced Lungren’s subsequent work is hard to answer. For example, it is difficult to discern any difference in his illustrations before and after that trip. This could, however, have as much to do with his lack of seniority among the illustrators and the financial necessity of pleasing his editors as with any personal choices. Numerous elements that might reflect the influence of Lungren’s two years in Paris surface considerably later. One of the crucial elements of French Impressionism is its reduction of motifs to visual sensation, expressed in discrete touches of paint whose effects combine optically in the eye and mind of the viewer. The Impressionists reveled in distinct climatic conditions, such as rain or fog, in part because they provided a denser fabric of atmosphere. This is a lesson to which Lungren returned 15 years later, exploring the transformative atmosphere of dense precipitation in London between 1899 and 1901. Other such aspects of French Impressionism emerge in Lungren’s late work, such as the employment of chromatic phenomena or the use of series.

In fact, the most important influence on Lungren’s later style derives less from any artworld experience than from a far more mundane source: the marketing strategy adopted by U.S. railroad companies in the early 1890s. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Santa Fe Railroad made a pitch for tourism of the West. As government geologists and other experts were sent to survey the 40th Parallel, the Great Plains, and the Grand Canyon in the 1850s and 1860s,¹⁰ now tourists seeking new experiences were to be induced to follow their tracks. Beginning in 1892, the Santa Fe Railroad offered artists free tickets, food, and lodging in return for paintings and drawings it could use in its marketing campaigns. Between 1892 and 1897 Lungren made annual trips to the region, one of the first artists sent by the Railway. His initial visit centered on the Grand Canyon, which he might have known from John Wesley Powell’s 1872 expedition, photographed by John Hillers, and published in Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District with Atlas, 1882.¹¹ Overwhelmed by the vast scale and majesty of the natural formation, Lungren made it the focus of many works, particularly In the Abyss (cat. no. 7), which is in form and scale clearly a painting intended for major exhibitions. Some of the images he created of the Canyon trip were published in an 1893 guidebook on the site, alongside paintings by Thomas Moran.¹²

In subsequent years, Lungren focused on the indigenous peoples of the Southwest. With the help of ethnologists J. Walter Fewkes and A.M. Stephen, he succeeded in gaining entry to the sacred and highly restricted Hopi Snake Dance. Lungren began working on images of the Snake Dance in 1893 and illustrated an 1896 Harper’s Weekly article on the ceremony. His watercolors Dance Court, Walpi (cat. no. 9) and Yellow Blanket (cat. no. 8) are studies for a monumental painting he showed, unfinished, in 1898. The Snake Dance canvas, which at 7 by 12 feet vastly outscales any of his work other than his backdrops for dioramas, did not appear in the initial transfer of Lungren’s bequest. It was gifted by John McGowan of Santa Barbara in 1984, 20 years after the "permanent collection" officially entered the University Art Museum. Because of its partial completion and fragile state of preservation, the Snake Dance cannot be shown in the current exhibition.

Dini also covers Lungren’s Southwest experiences in some depth. What is hard to convey is how distinctive, even earth-shattering these annual trips from 1892 through 1897 must have been. On his very first voyage Lungren visited the Grand Canyon. The 1893 guidebook by C. A. Higgins (to which Lungren contributed illustrations) establishes the challenge of capturing this visual marvel:
The terrific deeps that part the walls of hundreds of castles and turrets of mountainous bulk will be apprehended mainly through the memory of upward looks from the bottom, while towers and obstructions and yawning fissures that were deemed events of the trail will be wholly indistinguishable....for the panorama is the real over-mastering charm. It is never twice the same. Although you think you have spelt out every temple and peak and escarpment, as the angle of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly advance of colossal forms from the farther side, and what you had taken to be the ultimate wall is seen to be made up of still other isolated sculptures, revealed now for the first time by silhouetting shadows. The scene incessantly changes, flushing and fading, advancing into crystalline clearness, retiring into slumberous haze.¹³
Such visually detailed descriptions of virtual paintings helped to establish Lungren’s artistic goals. His many previous styles and subjects suggest a young artist casting around for his focus. It is true that for the next decade he continued to try out different media, subjects, points of view, and cultural associations, and in particular remained reluctant to give up the figure as subjective focus in his paintings. Yet the seed had been sown for his later immersion in the desert landscape as carrier of his vision.

This first stage of Lungren’s experience of the desert Southwest was followed by a three-year sojourn in London that began in 1899 and functioned as a sort of belated and extended honeymoon: he had married the former Henrietta Whipple less than a year earlier. In London she helped to establish social connections to James A. McNeill Whistler, Joseph Pennell, the American Ambassador, and other interesting society. Several of the works Lungren produced in England reveal Whistler’s influence. Rockets (cat. no. 15) is an overt homage, a mild and peopled version of Whistler’s celebrated and notorious Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875).¹⁴ Lungren found the British a skeptical audience for his exotic views of the American West.¹⁵ However, his local work seems to have been well received, especially the gloomy scenes for which his Tile Club friends labeled him "the nightmare painter." Liverpool (Docking a Liner) (cat. no. 14), The Arm of the Law (cat. no. 13), and other works in the current exhibition revel in the fog and rain for which England is known. Lungren was accepted as a member of the London Pastel Society, and he used his sojourn to experiment with the medium. The highly finished pastel compositions, such as Pool and Tower Bridge (cat. no. 17) and Earls Court: London (cat. no. 16), probably represent the kind of work he showed in the second annual Pastel Society Exhibition of 1900. In pastel and oil he developed a more painterly technique, finding atmospheric effects in urban scenes. Thus it is possible that Piccadilly Slope (cat. no. 18) and Passing Train: England (cat. no. 19) may have been created the following year.

In London Lungren also met Henry Wellcome, pharmacist, entrepreneur, and inventor, who invited the artist and his wife to join his expedition to "the Soudan" (mostly within the boundaries of modern-day Egypt). It is not known whether they participated as social guests or played an official role on the expedition.¹⁶ Upon their return, Lungren’s baggage was ransacked and most of the art he produced in Egypt was lost. The few works that survive from that trip might have been those shipped directly to the 1901 Pastel Society Exhibition, although two are executed in oil (see cat nos. 21 and 22).

According to Berger and supported by Lungren’s correspondence with Charles Lummis (founder of the Southwest Museum and a friend of the artist), that experience of the Saharan landscape confirmed the direction of his subsequent work. Back in London, "The call of the desert made itself heard in no uncertain notes, and no attempt at suffocating it would drown the insistent cry."¹⁷ Shortly after returning to the United States, the Lungrens moved to California, living for a few years in Los Angeles near Lummis. In 1906 they purchased land in the Pedregosa Tract of Santa Barbara, just above its famous Mission, and acquired rooms in the Harmer Studio building on De la Guerra Plaza. In 1908 the Lungrens moved into the adobe they built on their land, which still stands near the current Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

As early as 1892, when he first visited New Mexico and Arizona, Lungren was entranced by the space, light, geography, and cultures of the West. Now, settled in Santa Barbara, he began traveling regularly until his death in 1932 to the Mojave Desert, Owens Valley, Death Valley, the Sierra, the Grand Canyon, and elsewhere in search of singular vistas. The desert and canyon landscapes that make up the bulk of his oeuvre show his interest in the structure of the land and in the remarkable effects of light and climate. Lungren sought to portray the landscape’s drama, responding to the changes of times of day and weather as if to the nuances of a personality.¹⁸ After he moved West, Lungren focused on pure landscape. Berger characterizes the shift in heroic terms: "The decision to forsake man for the greater task of portraying nature by itself—not simply its rocks and sands, its peaks and plains, but the inner spirit of their significance to a human being—took courage. He realized that his reputation depended largely upon the human story of his pictures."¹⁹

Works we might place in the period 1903–1907 trace Lungren testing various solutions for his mature work. Fifth Street at Hill (cat. no. 27), circa 1909, is a holdover, representing Los Angeles through the lens of his London street scenes, whereas the pure landscape Moonrise at the White Mesa (cat. no. 31), dated 1904, is a harbinger of his future work. I am inclined to date The Freighter (cat. no. 29) to the early years of the 20th century as well, by virtue of its extraordinary palette. Although the painting features a stagecoach, and so, as in earlier work, still locates human subjects inside the landscape, in every other way it departs from earlier precedents. The figures—men and horses alike—are delineated in tones of violet; the background mesa is lemon yellow with pink highlights. None of the works that can be dated securely in the 19th century depart this radically from local color. Instead The Freighter tries out one of the features that distinguishes Lungren’s late work, the daring coloration that allows him to capture extraordinary moments of apperception.

In contrast to the early work, most of Lungren’s Santa Barbara oeuvre is undated. His home provided a stable base where he could set up his studio and work as he liked, counting on a support system of beloved wife, friends, and patrons. His working process probably consisted of two separate stages: first, sketching new motifs on site, and second, painting a full-scale canvas back in the studio. It is probably around this time that he began making oil sketches using small stretched canvases or canvas board to paint en plein air. On earlier trips, such as the railroad junkets, Lungren seems to have worked often in watercolor. Examples include Above the Inner Gorge (cat. no. 4), perhaps painted on one of his first trips to the Grand Canyon, and the first (published) version of Thirst.²⁰ However, the Lungren bequest does not include any watercolors that demand to be dated in the 20th century. Nor are there any pastels that correspond to these pure landscapes, although there are about five (literal) ruins, fragmentary experiments where pastel was layered with oil paint, of which only a few remnants adhere. Thus we have provisionally dated all works in those media earlier. Conversely we assume that most if not all full-scale pure landscapes in oils, the subjects for which Lungren was best known, date around or after his move to Santa Barbara.

Only two of the un-peopled landscapes in this catalogue have dates: Moonrise at the White Mesa inscribed 1904 and Poppies and Lupin (cat. no. 48) annotated "Antelope Valley 1912." We might be able to link a few paintings to Lungren’s first travels as a Californian: in 1903 he made good on his promise to show his wife the desert, touring New Mexico and Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon and the Hopi pueblo at Tusayan. That trip is chronicled by one of their traveling companions, William Allen White, in McClure’s Magazine; the article included early color reproductions of Lungren’s paintings. ²¹ Lungren’s painting of Canyon de Chelly (cat. no. 28) probably resulted from that trip, and Desert Gorge: Calico (cat. no. 26) resembles some of the published illustrations. On the other hand, some subjects will probably defy all attempts at dating. Death Valley: Dante’s View could be as early as 1908, the date of Lungren’s first trip to that extraordinary desert. It could reflect work on Death Valley, Sunrise, which he sold in 1910. It could date from the mid-1920s, when Fred Harvey opened the resorts at Furnace Creek and first began to publicize the site for tourism. Or it could be as late as 1928–29, when the artist completed a monumental canvas of the same scene as a background for the mountain sheep diorama at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. According to Berger, Lungren "…for the rest of his life was working on at least one Death Valley picture," and he records Lungren reworking and completing his large-scale Death Valley paintings at the very end of his life. ²² I believe the same pattern holds true for the expansive desert landscapes he painted, such as Desert Sand (Evening) (cat. no. 58) and Full Moon in the Mojave Desert (cat. no. 61). They could date from the first or last years Lungren spent in Santa Barbara, from around 1910 or as late as the mid-1920s.

As he investigated the desert Lungren incorporated lessons learned long ago from his visit to Paris in the 1880s; he also continued or resumed compositional devices first used in his figural Western scenes. His omnipresent spherical sage brush foreground appears in such illustrations as the plates for a Western novel by Kirk Munroe,²³ then recurs in the later pure landscapes. Lungren seems to have explored the coloristic lessons of Paris in such Western landscapes as The Freighter, Thunder Heads (cat. no. 42), or Inyo Range (cat. no. 54). His late landscapes evoke some of Monet’s compositional strategies: the high horizon and precipitous foreground of Poppies and Lupin is reminiscent of Monet in the 1880s.

Lungren defined his work as "impressionist," deliberately using a lower case "i" in acknowledgment of his great differences from early French Impressionism. Instead he referred his use of the term to his "trying to render my impressions as recorded by the memory of the subject."²⁴ He described at length his self-training in memorizing elements of a scene to be painted at leisure, collecting his "impressions" at a site and then organizing and intensifying them on the canvas back in his studio.²⁵ His lack of involvement with American Impressionists in New York in the last 15 years of the 19th century and his divergence from the styles and subjects of the California Impressionists once he moved to California suggest that Lungren had no intention of being seen within the discourse around Impressionism and simply chose to adopt those elements that were useful to him. This is consistent with other pragmatic decisions and patterns in his career. Whereas studio-trained artists often develop sensitivities to theoretical points, such as their choice of subject, their use of black pigment, or their depiction of space, Lungren seems to have ignored academic considerations, choosing instead to follow intuition and emotions. If anything, his decisions seem conservative, in the general sense of avoiding controversy and complications, keeping focused on what he cared about.

Henrietta died in 1917, sending the artist into deep despair and curtailing many of his social activities. It is possible that his output dropped considerably. Berger records how Lungren’s wife had created his society connections, organizing teas for him to exhibit recent works each year. After her death the artist was drawn into the society of the city. He was particularly involved in the creation of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts (1920–1938), serving as its first president and remaining active as a teacher and an advocate until his death. The only paintings we know he originated in the 1920s were backgrounds for two dioramas for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. In 1925 he painted the Colorado desert for a display of desert birds, no longer extant; in 1929 he repainted Death Valley from Dante’s View to create the environment for a mountain sheep display. That diorama stands alongside In the Abyss as one of the artist’s surviving masterworks. The high value he placed on that early painting is confirmed by a series of late portrait photographs made of the artist (see cat. no. 74). Sitting in a wicker armchair, standing quietly, or pretending to paint a few finishing touches, Lungren posed in front of his largest completed easel painting.²⁶

We have few details about the very end of Lungren’s life. Brett and Buella Moore, who moved to Santa Barbara in 1930, lived with him in his last years and helped manage his career, caring both for the paintings and their maker. Brett Moore was involved in repairs to the dioramas and helped Lungren continue to paint. One might speculate that Lungren Home: Mission Canyon (cat. no. 65) was painted at the very end of the artist’s life. Whereas most of his mature work records more distant (and strenuous) sites, this somewhat tremulous and tentative oil sketch represents the mountains that border Santa Barbara. One could imagine the aged artist persisting in painting although his horizons had been limited by infirmity.

As this narrative suggests, Lungren’s early work follows a clear trajectory. Most of his paintings and drawings can be dated to specific illustration jobs or trips, while his exhibitions history helps us anchor other pieces. Accordingly this retrospective falls into two distinct sections, a chronological survey of his early work and a representative selection of his later production. In fact, there are two options for sketching the shape of Lungren’s late work. Either he produced very little or he realized a group of daring landscapes that were heavily reworked several times. In this catalogue I experiment with the latter notion, dating as 1920s a group of works I had originally placed earlier. The dense craquelure of these paintings, ostensibly a sign of age, may reveal peculiarities in how they were made. Paradoxically, it is probably his last, more recent paintings that look the most "beat up," or distressed by the passage of time. Lava in the Desert (cat. no. 54), The Carpet of the Desert (Evening) (cat. no. 57), Desert Sand (Evening), and Silent Sea (cat. no. 63) go further than other desert scenes in realizing the extraordinary coloration of transitional times of day, from early dawn to the deep blues after nightfall. It is possible that as he approached the end of his life Lungren grew nearly obsessed with such nuance and affect. He may have returned many times to the same segment of paint, trying repeatedly to achieve some specific quality of light or hue. Berger testifies that Lungren often reworked canvases in the studio, describing his painstaking search for the exact color or effect he had observed. ²⁷ He probably experimented with the available media to create special effects. The conservation undertaken in the three years preceding this exhibition confirmed that many of the areas of dense craquelure had indeed been repainted. The extensive "interlayer cleavage," or separation between layers of paint, might be caused by applying new passages many years after the canvas was completed (it might also suggest a shift in the chemical composition of the paints). In a few cases a significant layer of paint had lifted enough for us to see the section below, where the colors or even the motif were different. Sometimes the delicate area responded too quickly to any treatment, suggesting the artist employed some experimental materials—perhaps draining off oil from paints or adding sections in casein or tempera. We hope that future work can include X-rays and pigment analyses to confirm some of these hypotheses.

Thus, even what might seem to be a technical fault ends up as meaningful evidence of Lungren’s intentions. Both his reuse of similar compositions and his return to rework certain passages suggest a deep involvement, even an obsession with this subject. His late theme might be considered the afterglow, the liminal shift from darkness to light and back again, the exquisite nuances he learned to perceive in the landscape he loved. In the transitional moments of sunrise and sunset Lungren discovered a pyrotechnic display more spectacular than the fireworks he painted in London at the turn of the century. Such pictures of open space, whether Death Valley, the Mojave Desert, or the region around the Grand Canyon, represent a dynamic and passionate linkage between art and the environment, one that continues to inform painting in California to the present day.

Elizabeth A. Brown
Chief Curator, UAM

1 The name of the local college changed frequently on its path to becoming UCSB. It was the Santa Barbara State Teacher’s College from1921 to 1935. Previously it had been a Normal School, as was typical of teachers colleges in the U.S.A.

2 Last Will and Testament of Fernand Lungren, signed November 2, 1932, Ninth item, p. 3, Collection files, University Art Museum (hereafter UAM archives).

3 In 1915 the Normal School provided a venue for an exhibition of Santa Barbara artists, John A. Berger, Fernand Lungren. Santa Barbara: The Schauer Press, 1936, p. 202 (hereafter Berger).

4 Letter from Francis Sedgwick to UCSB Chancellor Samuel B. Gould, August 29, 1960, UAM archives.

5 According to the Last Will and Testament, all of Lungren’s papers were given to Stewart Edward White. Their whereabouts is not known.

6 Berger, p. 164, "…it was the subtle mystery of the desert which he wanted to penetrate, then to interpret by his art. To conquer that obsession became his engrossing, gripping purpose."

7 Edward Strahan and F. Hopkinson Smith, A Book of the Tile Club. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1886.

8 Century Magazine, Vol. 5, January 1884, pp. 356–71.

9 Other examples include The Seine at Twilight, Hirschl & Adler Galleries.

10 For a vivid account of the "Great Surveys" and their impact on photography see May Castleberry et al., Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West. Exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996. For detailed accounts of the four main expeditions see Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.

11 Jane Dini has discovered that a copy of this publication was gifted by Lungren to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Library, although its whereabouts is not known.

12 C. A. Higgins, Grand Cañon of the Colorado River. Chicago: Passenger Department Santa Fe Route, 1893.

13 Higgins, p. 21.

14 Nocturne in Black and Gold (1874, Detroit Institute of Art) was the subject of a libel suit. John Ruskin castigated the work for "flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face." Although Whistler won the legal battle, he was awarded only a farthing in damages, which ruined him financially.

15 Recounted in a manuscript or journal by the artist, published posthumously as Fernand Lungren: Some Notes on His Life. Santa Barbara: School of the Arts, 1933, p. 25.

16 Ibid., pp. 26-27: "The invitation was one in which practically all expenses were to be paid by Mr. Welcome (sic). Much as we wished to go, we could not accept on those terms, and made a more satisfactory arrangement."

17 Ibid., p. 36.

18 "[W]hen I came face to face with a nature I could sit down before and become friends with, the method at first was of another order. Then, as you come to know a person, certain traits, characteristics and mannerisms show as you know them better, so it seemed to me the same applied to nature." Ibid., p. 44.

19 Berger, p. 140.

20 Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 40, February 8, 1896, pp. 126–28. For a discussion of the two versions of Thirst, see Dini below, pp. 35–37

21 William Allen White, "On Bright Angel Trail," McClure’s Magazine, Vol. 25, September 1905, pp. 502–15. Cf. Berger, pp. 134ff. The type- script, with corrections in Lungren’s hand, is in the UAM archives; White’s cover letter refers to his writing as transcribing Lungren’s voice.

22 Berger, pp. 168 and 292–93.

23 Kirk Munroe, The Painted Desert: A Story of Northern Arizona. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897. Cf. plates facing pp. 2, 132, and 272.

24 Some Notes, p. 43.

25 Berger, p. 304.

26 None of the photographs is signed, but their compositions and tonal range suggest the work of Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill, prominent
figures in the Santa Barbara art world of the 1920s, or their followers.

27 Berger, pp. 170 and 174–75.